She followed him up the first flight of stairs and turned toward the front of the house, presumably to her room. He continued to the attic and assessed the situation. The bookshelf was heavy, maybe not an antique, but certainly well-made. It would have to be, to hold all these books. If she’d arranged the books on the shelves, she’d done so neatly and evenly. Balanced, he realized.
The floor beneath was rough and warped, though, so moving it, even without the books, would be a challenge.
“How did you move this cabinet by yourself?” he asked down the stairs.
“Determination!” she called back.
Well, that was certainly the word he’d use to describe her. She must have been scared. But of what?
He pushed the cabinet back to its spot—obvious by the absence of dust. Man, she was strong. He opened the door and headed up the smaller flight of stairs.
Whew, what a mess. He checked the area, then walked down to one window, the one that was swollen shut. Not much he could do without replacing the frame, which he couldn’t do today, so he moved down the length of the house to the other window. This one he could fix today.
A few minutes after he set his toolbox down, he heard steps on the stairs behind him, and looked over his shoulder.
“Hey, look here,” he called her over. “Did you see this?”
“What?” she called, as if she couldn’t hear him, from the base of the stairs.
Not where the footsteps had been.
Despite himself, his heart gave a little jump in his chest, and he straightened. “Erielle?”
Footsteps again, and this time her head popped into view from the staircase.
“What is it?”
Maybe she was playing tricks on him. Or something. He motioned behind him to the window, where symbols had been etched in the wood over the window.
“Did you do this?”
“Do what?” Exasperation weighted her voice as she approached.
“Write this, or carve this, or whatever?” He was getting the idea she hadn’t. He waved his finger over the symbols, not wanting to touch them, and not sure why.
She squeezed past him, narrowing her gaze to peer at the carving on the top of the window frame. “No, I didn’t.”
This time her voice was wispy as the wind.
“Were they here when you and Cal were looking around?”
She was shaking her head before he finished speaking. “I couldn’t say. I don’t remember. We weren’t really looking for anything like this.” She leaned closer. “What does it mean?”
“And why is it up here?” he asked, already walking to the other end of the attic to look at the other window. Again, he saw the pattern etched in the soft wood above the window. This one was harder to read because of the water-swollen wood, but he thought the symbols were the same.
“Hang on,” she said, and bolted down the stairs.
He barely had time to wonder if she was coming back when she did, holding a pencil and a yellowed piece of paper. She marched back to the window, pressed the paper to the wood, and began rubbing the pencil sideways across it. She pulled down the paper to inspect it, frowning, then crossed the attic to repeat the process. This took more effort because of the warped wood. She looked at the images, then headed for the stairs.
“Where are you going?”
“To see if all the windows have these. And to find out what they could mean.”
Twelve
Some had been hiddenunder layers of old paint—until Samson scraped it away with the edge of his knife, careful not to mar the markings beneath.
She wished she’d thought to mark which rubbing belonged to which window before she’d gotten halfway through. By the time she realized, she’d already run out of clean paper. The only solution had been tearing pages out of forgotten books and pressing the pencil hard over the grain.
